A poem for Thursday

I've been moving day-to-day, stimulus-response. My sense of self, the thread that binds it all, has become a little frayed and loose. Some days, I've been looking at posts and tweets and wondering how it all keeps going, where we find the energy and the inspiration. Wondering just how ideas used to occur to me. Forgetting what it's like when there's enough air in the days to actually find inspiration, to actually hear myself.

Today is my last day at work before a vacation. It will be a restful holiday. I want to explore. And to walk (cf.) I want to finish some stories I've been working on that have gathered dust these past few busy weeks. Most of all, I want enough space to know what it is I want, and what I'm going to do next.

I'm going to Ireland. Every trip home is the same and different. Every trip there catches me off guard in some way, making me think things I didn't think I'd think. It can be jarring. And maybe it's a bad idea going there now, when I'm hoping for some kind of certainty. But part of me feels that it's in that kind of uncertainty that truth lies. And maybe I really want truth, not certainty at all.

And this is an old favourite, one you'll have seen here before. By Seamus Heaney.

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.